Poles mourn President Lech Kaczynski and dozens of the country’s top political and military leaders, killed in an air crash near Smolensk airport in Russia on 10 April. The plane was transporting the official party to a reconciliation ceremony at a site where Soviet troops had massacred some 20,000 members of Poland’s elite officer corps during the Second World War, an incident the Russians had for decades blamed on the Nazis. The crash happened in thick fog and killed all on board, including the president and his wife, the chiefs of the army and the navy, Poland’s deputy foreign minister, the president of the national bank and a number of members of parliament. A national week of mourning was declared, culminating in an open-air memorial service attended by hundreds of thousands in the capital Warsaw on Saturday 17 April. A state funeral for the president and his wife was held in Krakow the following day.

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Filip Ćwik was born in Poland in 1973, and received a degree in cultural studies from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. He has been a photojournalist with Newsweek Polska for more than 10 years, previously working for the Gazeta Wyborcza daily. Ćwik is a co-founder and member of Napo Images photographic agency. For many years his reportages for Newsweek focused on leading figures in the world of Polish politics. He also covered Afghanistan, Ukraine and Denmark. He is currently busy with a project on the former Russian republics.